Competent and good are not synonyms. Smart and good are not synonyms. Evil and competent are not synonyms. Virtues are not all moral virtues. Bravery is a morally neutral virtue. It makes bad people worse, and good people better and without it all virtues and vices are nearly meaningless. Competence is morally neutral. It is […]

So, I was reading about Zimmerman’s defense, since I wasn’t hanging on every word during the trial and I prefer to read than have the visual and auditory clutter of the talking heads on TV jamming my internal logic board, and I got a sudden rush of deja vu, or vuja de or something. Here are the money quotes:

Members of the jury took notes furiously as Officer Singleton later read out Zimmerman’s hand-written statement to the court.

‘As I headed back to my vehicle the suspect emerged from the darkness and said, “You got a problem?” and I said “No” and the suspect said, “You do now”.

‘Each time I attempted to sit up the suspect slammed my head. My head felt like it was going to explode.

‘I tried to slide out from under the suspect and continued to yell “help”. As I slid, the suspect covered my mouth and nose and stopped my breathing.

‘At this point I felt the suspect reach for my now-exposed firearm and say, “you are going to die tonight motherf***er”.’

Hmmm. I mean hummmm. I started hearing a little song in my head. Something about a convent girl from Mississippi who got involved with jazz and liquor:

It worked so well for Roxy Hart.

*************************************

I have to present my papers tomorrow for the third or fourth time since I moved from NJ. This time it’s for a certification that I am a natural born US citizen who is able to work in the US. It used to be that all you needed to present was a SSN. That’s not good enough anymore. Can I just say that my birth certificate is getting pretty fricking ragged at this point. And my social security card. AND my divorce papers that show that I am legally allowed to use my original name. AND my passport, deed to my house, three utility bills, etc, etc, etc. Where does it stop?? I have to keep a dossier ready at all times. No, I’m not kidding. If this is what elderly and minority voters are going through, we might as well just cancel all elections from now until eternity and let Republicans run everything. This level of identification is beyond ridiculous and is bound to hit women harder than men.

I definitely do not like the feeling I’m getting of having to carry around so much official documentation all the time.

If someone was chasing me around with a gun, I’d punch him in the nose and throw him on the ground if I could.
George Zimmerman told you exactly what you wanted to hear and you believed him. It never seems to occur to you that he was the initial attacker and it was Trayvon Martin who was standing his ground, right? Or doesn’t a black kid have that right?

On the contrary, you’re no different than the obot high info voter who doesn’t realize he’s being manipulated with words and images specifically tailored to his sub demographic. You don’t have to be low info to be bamboozled.

We’re getting kinda snarky here. The implication that I”m a racist in your above comment wouldn’t be so bad… save the fact that this place was a refuge for those of us licking our wounds drone the same cheap shots in ’08. I’m OK with the fact that this is no longer that place and have still been coming here. Th GZ trial has brought back much oh the ill will of that first Obama summer. One Obama blogger has been what I consider a voice of reason regarding the events surrounding the death of 17 year old Trayvon Martin.

From criminal defense attorney Jerilyn Merritt at her blog:

Standing Up For the Constitution – TalkLeft: The Politics Of Crime

The Constitution is not a rough draft. You don’t get to edit or erase parts of it to delete rights for an unpopular or hated defendant.

The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the rights of the citizen accused from the awesome powers of the Government. It was not enacted to protect the rights of crime victims.

The presumption of innocence is a bedrock of our criminal justice system that applies to the person charged with a crime, not the victim of a crime.

Self-defense is an affirmative defense that may be raised by a defendant in court in response to a criminal charge…

My above comment (in moderation) was from the heart. I was hoping to bring facts to this forum. My background leaves me open to charges of racism, and truth be told I am a recovering average white guy. Born in 1946 but fortunately in San Francisco, not the Southern California of my really racist relatives. My children are multi-ethnic and look a lot like George Zimmerman. The lynching of “Mexicans” in Southern California in the early 20th century is a matter of historical record. I struggle with my past.

“Accounts of lynching in the United States have primarily focused on violence against African Americans in the South. Ken Gonzales-Day reveals racially motivated lynching as a more widespread practice. His research uncovered 350 instances of lynching that occurred in the state of California between 1850 and 1935. The majority were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity.”http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=13462

Duh.
The proportion of African Americans was higher in the south than in California because of slavery. There were more Asians, Latinos and native Americans there than African Americans.
I’m not sure that this is supposed to prove anything except that white guys have had it in for everybody who is not like them and they still get away with it in the 21st century.
I guess everybody is expected to progress but them.

If they’re that dumb, maybe they should be second class citizens: adult age but morally and ethically undeveloped, like perpetual small children. I guess that would flip the categories for women and white men but such is the progress of observed science. Longitudinal, large scale studies, after all.

My mentioning the stat on lynching in CA was to footnote my comment- still in moderation -about racism as applied to Hispanics. A portion of the comment: “My children are multi-ethnic and look a lot like George Zimmerman. The lynching of “Mexicans” in Southern California in the early 20th century is a matter of historical record. ”

The significance of this stands on its own merits. The crimes against blacks do too.
Is Zimmerman deserving of peace and safety after his acquittal? I think we as Americans need to answer this.
That’s all.

If I could tell someone chasing me was carrying a gun (it was dark) I’d hide and call 911. No way am I stupid enough to go up against an armed person. Any self defense instructor will tell you the same.

It was all over for me when the dispatcher told Zimmerman to stand down. Zimmerman ignored that injunction and went hunting. Really, that exchange summarized the whole episode and who did what to whom. From that point on, Martin was defending himself from an attcker with a far more lethal weapon.

I asked a friend .What he thought. he alluded to the common misconception that GZ was told to stay in his truck but the gunslinger disobeyed police orders and got out and hunted Martin down. When I pointed out the factual error he fell back on the fact that; “nobody really knows what really happened that night.” And I said; “isn’t it great GZ WASN’T CONVICTED THEN!?”

​Per William A. Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Zimmerman was out of his car before the police dispatcher
told him the police diidn’​t “need” him to follow Martin:

There is a second and implicit part of the myth, namely that Zimmerman was told not to follow Martin (in addition to being told not to get out of his car). Jonathan Capehart, in the column noted above, correctly debunked that myth, Five myths about the killing of Trayvon Martin:

“Are you following him?” the operator for the Sanford police’s non-emergency line asks Zimmerman. “Yeah,” he says. The dispatcher on the phone tells him: “We don’t need you to do that.”

Who the aggressor was that fateful night is the central — and most unanswerable — question of the case. Those who fault Zimmerman have latched on to this back-and-forth with Sean Noffke, the operator, as proof that Zimmerman defied a direct police order.

Not so. Noffke testified on the first day of the jury trial that it is dispatchers’ policy not to give orders to callers. “We’re directly liable if we give a direct order,” he explained. “We always try to give general basic . . . not commands, just suggestions.” So, “We don’t need you to do that” is different than a more direct “Don’t do that.”

Under cross-examination, Noffke added more context to his “suggestion” when asked whether his requests for updates on what Martin was doing encouraged Zimmerman to follow the unarmed 17-year-old. “It’s best to avoid any kind of confrontation, to just get away from the situation,” Noffke said.

If the media refuses to correct the obvious factual inaccuracy that Zimmerman was told not to get out of his car, it seems hopeless to get the media to correct this other part of the myth. Capehart made a good attempt at it, as have others, to no avail..

The myth will survive because it is part of the background narrative, an assumption upon which arguments implicitly rest.

Regardless of what they think of the verdict, most Americans will go to their graves believing the myth that “if only George Zimmerman had not gotten out of the car when the police told him not to.”

From:

Soap in a sponge: The enduring myth that George Zimmerman was told not to get out of his car
Posted by William A. Jacobson Wednesday, July 17, 2013 at 1:33pm

There are many lessons to be learned from the media miscoverage of the George Zimmerman shooting of Trayvon Martin.

In this sea of media malpractice, one enduring fabrication lives on despite conclusive trial testimony, the concept that Zimmerman was ordered, instructed, or told not to get out of his car by the 911 operator.

I completely debunked this concept when it was assumed by Jonathan Capehart at WaPo, In busting Zimmerman myths, Jonathan Capehart perpetuates the greatest myth of all. I emailed Capehart about it, he responded “fair point,” and as of this writing the offending comment about Zimmerman being told not to get out of this car no longer is in Capehart’s column. Good for him.

But the myth lives on in part because other media is not as responsible.

That makes it worse. If they didn’t need him to do that, he did it because he wanted to. He wasn’t helping the police: he was out to hunt him down a black criminal. Or a big, black “thug” who looked like he might be a “predator” engaged in a “crime spree”. All assumptions applied to one lad carrying home sweets and a soft drink in a perfectly law-abiding way. The fact that so many americans buy that defence, that so many think they too would feel threatened by a 17 year old strolling down the street if he was black, and quite happily gun him down and feel justified, tells the rest of the world more about the US than any number of Supreme Court decisions touting the death of racism.

Once upon a time, the Dred Scott decision was the correct verdict all the way up to the Supreme Court. That lead to a civil war.
Something can be perfectly legal and still be morally wrong. It was morally wrong for George Zimmerman to get out of his car and chase a black teenager around with a gun. Any person would find that life threatening behavior. In this case, Zimmerman was the assailant, he killed an unarmed black kid who was fighting for his life and he got away with it because the kid had the gall to defend himself.
That’s how *I* see it and so do millions of other Americans. What Zimmerman did was wrong. Legally, he isn’t guilty but his own actions indicate he was wrong.

NJ has similar onerous ID requirements. South Africa’s aparteid regime has found a new home in America: “Papers, boy!” And we thought USSR was such a stark contrast to the freedom of America. We bragged on it.

As a brown Hispanic who has received a few comments in my lifetime that were clearly racist, I empathize with the Blacks. I also live in a city with a good number of Black residents and I have Black neighbors. I’ve also lived in a “lily white” city. Bottom line, I know what I’m talking about from experience, not imaginings. I read comments from many who think they support the Blacks but would not walk in my neighborhood. It’s all nonsense. As much as I empathize with the predicament of the Blacks and Hispanics who must deal with racism, most Blacks and Hispanics would rather walk in a dark new moon night in an all white neighborhood than in a all Black or all Hispanic neighborhood.

Racism exists and hurts both Blacks and HIspanics, but mostly on the economic level. So let’s work on that, not on imaginary problems. The criminal justice system is horrible for everyone. It’s rotten through and through for whites, blacks, browns, and yellows. That’s a fact. Only those who have money can defend themselves.

What we really know:
Zimmerman followed Martin — that may be scary, but it was not illegal.
Martin beat the cr@p out of Zimmerman — that is illegal.
Zimmerman shot Martin — the jury found Zimmerman Not Guilty

Zimmerman will not be the first nor the last who will have to use self-defense. I feel bad for Zimmerman because he should be able to put this episode behind him and resume his life without having to look over his shoulder. I wish him well.

RD, I notice that you like others use their imaginings to make their case against Zimmerman, e.g. Zimmerman “chased” Martin. But that was not established in the trial. The prosecutors never accused or established that Zimmerman “chased” Martin. In fact, Martin appears to have turned back to confront Zimmerman. It was established that MAYBE Zimmerman followed Martin if you don’t believe that Zimmerman was looking for the name of the street to tell the police exactly where Martin was. So the “chasing” happened only in your head.

Or he chased Martin, gun in hand and the kid decided to tell him to back off. That’s what I would have done. But we’ll never know because we only have zimmerman’s word for what happened and he says they both reached for the gun.
How conveeeeeenient.

Let me imagine that. G-Z gun in hand runs after running Martin. He holds the gun pointed right at Martin’s heart while Martin beats the cr@p out of him. G-Z gets tired of the pounding he’s taking and says to himself: “Oh, WTF” and shoots Martin knowing full well that the police is on its way. In fact the police is there within a minute of the shooting. Is that the story in your head? Okay.

The weapon Zimmerman used, a Kel Tec 9F is specifically designed to be a cheap concealed carry weapon. The thing weighs 13 ounces and is flat. It doesn’t effectively shoot more than 1 shot as it tends to jam. One thing about it, no hair trigger. Zimmerman’s shot was not in the least accidental. He meant to shoot at a close range and shoot to kill.

About that registration thing, in most european countries the government keeps a record of where everyone lives. If you are born, then that has to be reported within days to the government.
It makes it easy for the government to then tax their citizens, but also to send them a card to come to vote and makes “identity/voting fraud” much more difficult.

Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

"Barrett Brown has been released from prison; WikiLeaks publishes to celebrate: Today, investigative journalist Barrett Brown has been released from FCI Three Rivers to a halfway house outside Dallas, earlier than initially scheduled. His parents picked him up from the federal prison to drive him six hours to his new residence. Brown's release come […]